Operation Ghost Stories

Operation Ghost Stories

Never-before seen videos, pictures, and documents of the decade-long FBI counterintelligence investigation into Russian spies are now available to the public.

Audio Transcript

Halpern: Never-before seen videos, pictures, and documents of the decade-long FBI counterintelligence investigation into Russian spies are now available to the public.

C. Frank Figliuzzi: The public gets to see the digging up of buried cash; they get to see flaws in the Russians’ operations.

Halpern: I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau, and this is FBI, This Week. The investigation focused on a network of covert Russian Federation agents in America whose goal it was to infiltrate U.S. policy-making circles. The spies did not get their hands on U.S. classified data. Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division Frank Figliuzzi says the FBI used sophisticated techniques and resources to build a criminal case against them.

Figliuzzi: As resolved as the Russian intelligence service was to penetrate our U.S. policy-making circles, the FBI had even greater resolve to stop that from happening.

Halpern: The codename for the case was dubbed Operation Ghost Stories, since many of the spies assumed the identities of dead people—a move known in the intelligence community as “dead doubles.” To learn more about Operation Ghost Stories, visit www.fbi.gov.